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Adobe Rolls Out Privacy Controls In Flash Player 10.3
adeelarshad82 writes "Adobe has released Flash Player 10.3, which includes enhanced privacy controls for how your activity is tracked online. Users can now clear local storage — sometimes known as 'Flash cookies' — on versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. Flash cookies, or local shared objects, made headlines last year when the Federal Trade Commission released a report that called on browser makers to include a 'do not track' option in their products. The FTC also mentioned Adobe because it said the cookies gathered by Flash are collected regardless of the browser's settings."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hmm, apparently, gnash has been ported to Windows. I'll have to see how well that works. But given that pretty much the only Flash I use is youtube, gnash ought to suffice.
Given how many things are wrong with Flash, this is barely a blip on the screen.
Or, you don't install it.
Personally, I've hated Flash for almost a decade and don't install it if I can avoid it ... usually my work machines end up needing it for some 3rd party site they force us to use. But, I don't make a habit of having it enabled.
I'm not sure I can name one instance where I found Flash to be useful or something I'd want. Although, who knows, maybe I'm missing out on something really cool ... but my experience with Flash has primarily been about having half a dozen ads on screen that are all in motion.
Well, that and the fact that it's been a gaping security hole since forever.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
A bit more important addition is more tracking : http://slashdot.org/submission/1581820/Flash-Player-103-adds-tracking
I first knew Flash was evil when there were no such controls in the first version ever released.
How much more acceptance would there be of this product if they had just built in some level
of end-user control from the beginning? Cookie clearing, Don't play till I say, No sound till I say,
Continuous loops controls, etc, etc.
Instead they thru all their weight at supporting punch-the-monkey advertisers and to hell with
the users.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You might not control your privacy, but you could at least try to, control, your use, of commas. And I just have to ask, who controls your hardware and service provider?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
All I want is a button that will set flash content to load only with approval. This is already done third party, but if Adobe did it one might think Flash was more than just a method to push near pornographic advertising onto innocent users. As it is, the infrastructure to approve cookies is horribly unreliable.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You do not, control, your privacy..
William Shatner, is that you?
I'm almost as paranoid about online privacy, but I will take these small victories when I can.
I read it as if he were trying to be a cheerleader. "You do not *clapclap* control *clapclap* your privacy!"
It's only taken until version 10 for them to add such advanced features such as deleting cookies...
MABASPLOOM!
He should have used an em dash for that purpose.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Orly? So if I leave all of my information unprotected on my laptop and it gets stolen, all I have to do is contact my ISP and everything is safe? And here I thought encryption, passwords, etc were helping, I'm, such, a, fool!,!,!,!,!
Hey everyone, my password is chol5era, go ahead try to use it, hardware and ISP will protect me!
So the lesson is: providers do whatever the hell they want with your data until they get caught and enough people complain. Then within a year or two, they put out a "fix."
After that, you can be 100% positive that they are completely looking out for your privacy. Right? All you have to do is... um, well it is closed source. But they say it's OK now.
Which made them an obscure company that only the most hardcore geeks have ever heard of, producing software that no one uses.
That would have been more ideal anyway.
Instead, "users" tend to display the same masochism as the most stereotypical battered spouses. "He didn't mean it, I'll give him benefit of doubt, this time he'll CHANGE, he said he'd change and I know he really means it, all those other times were different, this time it's for real!" No matter how asinine or abusive a company becomes, no matter how insecure their products, no matter how anti-customer their actions, people will keep coming back for more. That's the root cause of the problem; to address anything else is to get distracted by secondary and tertiary effects.
We'll have real privacy and security the moment average people value those things more than they value OOH SHINY! Until then it's difficult to blame the companies for treating them like ignorant sheep when they're so willing to assume that role. Don't get me wrong, the suits who make these decisions are still bastards but they're only responding to a sort of demand. If you're interested in effecting a permanent change you have to get over that and focus your efforts on convincing users to change their priorities and attitudes.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Linux:
FTFY.
Has anyone ever experienced a single ill effect, or even slight inconvenience, from deleting ~/.adobe and ~/.macromedia and replacing both with symlinks to /dev/null?
If not, I wonder how difficult it would be to make those an /etc/skel/ default in major distributions. It should be an easy sell, considering decisions with fewer benefits that cause problems for many more users (such as replacing ALSA with PulseAudio as a default sound system) have become default for several major distros.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
"I first knew Flash was evil when there were no such controls in the first version ever released."
Checking into reality can lead to less unhappiness. When Flash introduced local-storage towards 2002, there was also per-domain control. But a SWF can be any size, and Player has no native UI chrome. That's why the context-click to call up "Settings" brought up a webpage, which hosted a SWF using and controlling your own local data.
In the last few years browsers have also introduced local-storage, and so awareness grew. Adobe co-developed the NPAPI interface so browser UI can control plugin storage.
Rephrased, the control has always been there, but the interface is now more closely integrated with both browser and OS.
jd/adobe
> Linux: ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/
"~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/ -> /dev/null" /dev/null".
works for me. I also have "~/.adobe/Flash_Player/AssetCache ->
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Over umpteen versions and so many years, and they still haven't added settings to disable audio (banners and embedded video commercials with audio enabled have become worse over time) and it has only grown increasingly bloated over hogging processing and memory. Thankfully Opera makes it simple and accessible to disable the plugin for the majority of browsing, or even on a per-site basis for the worst offenders. But these are things that Adobe should be implementing so users can take control of what plays on their PC.
One of the things I had to consider when I bought my iPhone recently was that it couldn't play Flash--and the more I debated this the more I realized that 99% of Flash on the web is now junk. Despite the occasional Flash game or intentionally viewing an embedded video, I suspect we would all be better off without it on most sites.
I've been running Flash free for several months, except for Flash built in to Chrome. I don't use Chrome as my primary browser, so sites see me as someone without Flash. When I need to access something that requires Flash, I open it in Chrome. If it requires Flash and it won't work in Chrome, I won't use the site.
Interesting side note, most sites that require Flash give me an incorrect message saying:
I don't need to update anything, I don't have Flash installed, and I want it that way. Very few give me a message saying I need to install Flash Player for the site to function (correctly). Note to site developers, STOP designing sites that require Flash to work.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
While I'm happy to see this as an end user - they did have good applications as well. They were a great mechanism for tracking fraudsters across cookie wipes... The more savvy ones knew better but for those who didn't it saved us a lot of losses...
Thank you, I'll make a note of it...
How do you make it render on Slashdot? Using two dashes is very... uncouth..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Still no official support for 64-bit platforms. That Nov 2010 release of 'Square' is the only thing that works on my Firefox 4 64-bit build with Snow Leopard.
I've been deleting ~/.adobe and ~/.macromedia regularly for quite a while now and haven't had any unexpected problems. The only downside is that it deletes my progress in flash games.
Ampersand mdash semicolon — like so.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Firefox: BetterPrivacy
Being able to manually delete LSO's is ok but too labour-intensive. The addon above lets you delete-on-close like regular cookies you flag as "allow for session" in FF.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
I have my ~/.adobe and .macromedia folders linked to a ramdisk. Sometimes it's necessary to allow flash cookies for limited time uses. For example, once southparkstudios.com wouldn't load and temporarily enabling flash cookies resolved the problem (my memory is hazy, but I think this happened about a year and a half ago). Since I turn off my computer every night, it's (hopefully) not a big deal if my cookies are only saved for a few hours/days at a time. Likewise, I think it's relatively safe if I set firefox to save cookies only until my browser closes.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager06.html still seems to work too.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Slim quick install versions without crapware at the bottom of page on Adobes site here:
Slim Version
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
It still accesses the camera and mic. It ain't safe if we can't have the choice of not installing that functionality in the first place.
Install the Better Privacy addon for Firefox. It lets you manage LSOs and delete them on exit.
EDIT: Okay, I've now read TFA, they've made it easier - not that they've made it possible.
Puzzle Daze is now my job
For about 15 years I would install Flash upon getting a new machine or restoring one. I might go by a few days without downloading the plugin, but eventually there would be some circumstance where I conceded.
I've been using the iPad most of the day lately and the lack of Flash is rarely a problem, certainly not one that would convince me to leave the couch and go to my desktop. When I do encounter Flash my first thought is, "Good thing this will soon disappear like RealPlayer eventually did.". If your website didn't have enough foresight not to use Flash in 2011, then it's not worth visiting.